I started this as a morning meditation on thankfulness, looking at this weekend, but accidentally deleted it unsent while we were out running errands. I think it will go in a slightly different direction now.

Have you ever thought about the idea that if Jesus only saved us from hell, we would owe Him our eternal gratitude? Yet He saved us *for Heaven (whether that is away from here or whether it comes down to us here, since admired Bible teachers can teach that either way) and He saved us in a century where life on this earth is itself pretty full of blessings, at least in our country.

We could have been saved during the Roman Empire and faced outright persecution.

We could have been saved in the Middle Ages and had no Bible of our own, plus no ability to read it. We might have been subsistence farmers under the feudal system in Western Europe or under the serfdom system in Eastern Europe.

We could have been saved during the Spanish Inquisition or Mary I's similar purge of non-Catholics in England (because her grandparents authored the Spanish Inquisition).

We could have been saved as American slaves or as the subsistence farmers that populated much of the rest of the country except for the land owned by a few wealthy plantation owners in the South.

We could have been saved in one of Hitler's concentration camps and gone to Heaven right afterwards.

We could even have lived as mature adults in the 1940's and 1950's when medical treatments were pretty primitive compared to now and cancer was a death sentence for so many, along with other conditions like polio.

But God has allowed us to be His children right now in the 2020's. We have so much abundance and a challenging mission field in our own country. In God's sovereignty He put us here right now.

We celebrate His resurrection tomorrow! It is our main reason for being here in 2023!

Let us rejoice!